SLICING-BASED RESOURCE ALLOCATION AND MOBILITY MANAGEMENT FOR EMERGING WIRELESS NETWORKS

The proliferation of smart mobile devices and user applications has continued to contribute to the tremendous volume of data traffic in cellular networks. Moreover, with the feature of heterogeneous connectivity interfaces of these smart devices, it becomes more complex for managing the traffic volume in the context of mobility. To surmount this challenge, service and resource providers are looking for alternative mechanisms that can successfully facilitate managing network resources and mobility in a more dynamic, predictive and distributed manner. New concepts of network architectures such as Software-Defined Network (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV) have paved the way to move from static to flexible networks. They make networks more flexible (i.e., network providers capable of on-demand provisioning), easily customizable and cost effective. In this regard, network slicing is emerging as a new technology built on the concepts of SDN and NFV. It splits a network infrastructure into isolated virtual networks and allows them to manage network resources based on their requirements and characteristics. Most of the existing solutions for network slicing are facing challenges in terms of resource and mobility management. Regarding resource management, it creates challenges in terms of provisioning network throughput, end-to-end delay, and fairness resources allocation for each slice, whereas, in the case of mobility management, due to the rapid change of user mobility the network slice operator would like to hold the mobility controlling over its clients across different access networks, rather than the network operator, to ensure better services and user experience. In this thesis, we propose two novel architectural solutions to solve the challenges identified above. The first proposed solution introduces a Network Slicing Resource Management (NSRM) mechanism that assigns the required resources for each slice, taking into consideration resource isolation between different slices. The second proposed v solution provides a Mobility Management architecture-based Network Slicing (MMNS) where each slice manages its users across heterogeneous radio access technologies such as WiFi, LTE and 5G networks. In MMNS architecture, each slice has different mobility demands (e.g,. latency, speed and interference) and these demands are governed by a network slice configuration and service characteristics. In addition, NSRM ensures isolating, customizing and fair sharing of distributed bandwidths between various network slices and users belonging to the same slice depending on different requirements of each one. Whereas, MMNS is a logical platform that unifies different Radio Access Technologies (RATs) and allows all slices to share them in order to satisfy different slice mobility demands. We considered two software simulations, namely OPNET Modeler and OMNET++, to validate the performance evaluation of the thesis contributions. The simulation results for both proposed architectures show that, in case of NSRM, the resource blocking is approximately 35% less compared to the legacy LTE network, which it allows to accommodate more users. The NSRM also successfully maintains the isolation for both the inter and intra network slices. Moreover, the results show that the NSRM is able to run different scheduling mechanisms where each network slice guarantee perform its own scheduling mechanism and simultaneously with other slices. Regarding the MMNS, the results show the advantages of the proposed architecture that are the reduction of the tunnelling overhead and the minimization of the handover latency. The MMNS results show the packets delivery cost is optimal by reducing the number of hops that the packets transit between a source node and destination. Additionally, seamless session continues of a user IP-flow between different access networks interfaces has been successfully achieved

Seamless LTE-WiFi Architecture for Offloading the Overloaded LTE with Efficient UE Authentication

Nowadays a cellular network suffers from a data traffic load in a metropolitan area due to the enormous number of mobile devices connectivity. Therefore, the users experience many issues because of a congestion and overload at an access network such as low throughput, long latencies and network outages. Current network operator’s solutions, such as capping data usage and throttling a connection speed, have a negative effect on the user satisfaction. Therefore, alternative solutions are needed such as Access Point (AP)-based complementary network. In this paper, we use WiFi as a complementary network to Long-Term Evolution (LTE). We propose a seamless network architecture between LTE and WiFi networks, by utilizing the packet gateway (P-GW) as an IP flow anchor between LTE and WiFi to maintain a seamless connectivity. The proposed architecture has two new components, Access Network Query Protocol-Data Server (ANQP-DS) and Access Zone Control (AZC), to WiFi core network for managing UE authentication and balancing the load of UEs between APs. Finally, we demonstrate and validate the effectiveness of our proposed idea over other prior approaches based on comparison with a current handover and Extensible Authentication Protocol-Authentication and Key Agreement (EAP-AKA) mechanisms in the literature through simulations

An Efficient Resource Management Mechanism for Network Slicing in LTE Network

The proliferation of mobile devices and user applications has continued to contribute to the humongous volume of data traffic in cellular networks. To surmount this challenge, service and resource providers are looking for alternative mechanisms that can successfully facilitate managing network resources in a more dynamic, predictive and distributed manner. New concepts of network architectures such as Software Defined Network (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV) have paved the way to move from static to flexible networks. They make networks more flexible (i.e. network providers capable of on-demand provisioning), easily customizable and cost effective. In this regard, network slicing is emerging as a new technology built on the concepts of SDN and NFV. It splits a network infrastructure into isolated virtual networks and allows them to manage resources allocation individually based on their requirements and characteristics. Most of the existing solutions for network slicing are computationally expensive because of the length of time they require to estimate the resources required for each isolated slice. In addition, there is no guarantee that the resource allocation is fairly shared among users in a slice. In this paper, we propose a Network Slicing Resource Management (NSRM) mechanism to assign the required resources for each slice in an LTE network, taking into consideration resources isolation between different slices. In addition, NSRM aims to ensure isolation and fair sharing of distributed bandwidths between users belonging to the same slice. In NSRM, depending on requirements, each slice can be customized (e.g. each can have a different scheduling policy)

Seamless Mobility Management in Heterogeneous 5G Networks: A Coordination Approach among Distributed SDN Controllers

The major objective of evolution towards 5G networks is to support increasing number of end devices with stringent latency and high bandwidth requirements. Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV) are paving the way in supporting such requirements of 5G networks. In this paper, we propose a seamless mobility management for the users when they move from a SDN controller coverage to another in 5G heterogeneous networks. Our proposed solution utilizes the key-value Distributed Hash Table (DHT) to catch users’ mobility in a distributed SDN controller to address scability and seamlessness, where mobile device may join and leave between different associated SDN controllers. The proposed solution allows to select an appropriate AP with cooperation of mobile devices and controllers, so that network performance can be maximized and users’ demand can be met in a dynamically changing of network condition. The performance evaluated using OMNeT++ simulator imparts that the solution introduced in this paper can successfully reduce handover latency around 50% compared to the conventional mobility management solutions